Piecework

We would read the papers sitting in doorways on the avenues, memorizing statistics, knowing each minor fluctuation in averages, at bats, strikeouts, or walks. In those days, ERA stood for earned-run average; for some of us it still does. And when we had finished with the sports pages, we would turn to the comics: “Dick Tracy,” Milton Caniff’s “Terry and the Pirates,” and, later, “Steve Canyon,” and some of us would cut them out, pasting entire runs of the strips into scrapbooks, making our own comic books. I was probably the only reader of PM in that neighborhood, because it carried Crockett Johnson’s great comic strip “Barnaby,” about a young boy with a fairy godfather named O’Malley who smoked cigars and was a Dodger fan.

Reading the papers, before or after a game, was usually accompanied by eating or drinking Yankee Doodles and Devil Dogs, iced Pepsi, Mission Bell grape, Frank’s orange. It seems to me I spent hundreds of hours with seven or eight other guys sucking the air out of empty soda bottles and letting them dangle from my lips. Slowly, gravity would pull the bottles away from our lips, air would leak in, the bottles would disconnect and fall. If you were the last man left, you won the deposit money.

You needed money for soda, spaldeens, comics, and newspapers, but you didn’t need money for a lot of other things. You knew that sneakers had to last an entire summer, no matter how worn and disgusting they became, so you learned to bandage them with tape. You would have one pair of roller skates for the season, and one skate key. The skates were the kind that clamped on shoes and had metal wheels. When the wheels began to wear out (developing “skellies”), we took the skates apart, nailed them to two-by-fours, nailed milk boxes to the top of the two-by-fours, and scooter season had begun.

Street games were constant: ringolevio, giant steps, buck buck (how many horns are up?), a bizarre wartime game called concentration camp (Nazis were one team, rounding up the rest of us, and torturing us). Off-the-point and single-double-triple-home-run required spaldeens and were played off stoops; boxball was another variation, as restrained as cricket. Clearly, the spaldeen was at the heart of most of the games, and near the end of the day we would prowl the rooftops looking for balls that had been caught in drains, wedged behind pigeon coops, stuck under slats or behind chimneys. We would boil them to make them clean and to give them more bounce. One day, my brother Tommy boiled a half dozen such balls in a big pot, and they came out pink and glistening. Later on, my mother came home from work, and he made her a cup of tea. She gagged. Tommy hadn’t changed the water, and the lovely amber-colored tea tasted of pure spaldeens. The rest of us would have loved the brew.

We played touch football with rolled and taped newspapers. Because of the cost, I didn’t hold a real football in my hands until I was sixteen, and I never had a bike. I didn’t feel at all deprived. Hockey was played with a puck made of crumpled tin cans, and basketball was a Bronx game. We had no backyard because the house was on an avenue, so there were no pools or hoses to cool us off; we opened the fire hydrants with a wrench and made a spray by holding a wooden slat against the cascading water. There was room to run barefoot in the streets then, because there were almost no cars. Later, when the war was over and the cars came, they ended the hydrants and ruined the stickball courts and stained the fresh morning air. But we didn’t know that would happen. We lived with nouns: marbles, comics, lots, roofs, factories, balls, newspapers, scores. But we were verbs. Verbs to be, and verbs that were active. We didn’t know that the nouns contained their own cemeteries.

Coney Island was the great adventure. We went there by trolley car, on a long clacking journey that took us through the last New York farms, with tomato plants ripening on either side of us; figs and dates growing in yards, farmers scratching at spinach fields. I was there the day Luna Park burned down, the giant plumes of smoke billowing into the sky and women crying. And when that old amusement park was gone, we were left with Steeplechase the Funny Place, 31 rides for half a dollar — that and Nathan’s, when hot dogs were a dime and never ever tasted better again anywhere in America. We camped in Bay 12, near Nathan’s, and later moved down to the bay in front of Scoville’s, a great Irish summer saloon with umbrellas in the back, where the women sat in summer dresses, and the men bought beer by the pitcher, and the bar smelled of pretzels and suntan oil; and we finished at Bay 22, in front of a place called Oceantide, near Sea Gate.